MWC, Barcelona: Spanish telco Telefónica has unveiled a 5G-connected digital twin designed to optimize quality in the production of industrial parts. The digital twin also has the the capacity to make decisions in real time, it said.
Telefónica’s digital twin features a KR4 robotic arm, manufactured by automation solutions firm KUKA, which simulates the construction of an industrial part and moves in time with a digital representation of both the robotic arm and the part.
The demo at MWC, under the title ‘Making Smart Industry happen’, recreates the industrial process, running simulations to make the manufacturing process more efficient by also detecting possible faults in the manufacture of parts.
The firm said digital twins help firms to mitigate the risks associated with production and optimize the use of resources to achieve greater profitability, while they also contributes to increased efficiency and energy savings.
Leonor Ostos, innovation manager at Telefónica, said: “The digital twin is aimed at improving organizations’ real-time decision-making. The union of the digital and physical worlds of factories requires significant technological development – [with] 5G, edge computing, data analytics, and machine learning – and allows companies to increase the accuracy of their industrial processesm reduce production times, and achieve high quality rates.”
Jordi Carafi, sales support team manager at Kuka, said processes in modern factories present major challenges for managing high numbers of product batches. “These trends demand maximum flexibility and speed of reaction from robotic systems. In this context, 5G offers excellent bandwidth and high reliability, an essential value especially in the most demanding productions,” he said.
Telefónica also showed 5G-supported automation of a vineyard in Galicia. The demo includes precision agriculture solutions, smart irrigation management, plus traceability of production process and product origins via Blockchain.
The MWC setup shows how to remotely monitor climate and soil conditions of the vineyard showing a range of management functionalities on cloud platforms. A number of NB-IoT applications in display at its booth at MWC include for monitoring climate and soil conditions, remote irrigation control, disease prevention, and agronomic decision-making.
